An interesting thing happens one day: a group of indigenous peoples, lets say the Huaorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon, have millions of gallons of toxic waste from sources like toxic drilling chemicals and wastewater that flows from shamelessly cheap safety valves that look sort of like a giant, bleeding snake the size of a modest halfpipe that won’t die. They would be imprisoned if they used that rig in the U.S. This can be directly traced to a few decision makers choices which, perhaps alone were not found criminal (perhaps because of the limited liability that protects their business entity), in conjunction result in starvation and poisoning amongst the indigenous people who were partially (mayhaps mostly) sold out by Ecuador, a country which didn’t have the most sophisticated understanding of the oil industry or the chemicals which were used. Officials at every level of government able to pocket money a little money and look the other way, often having no idea of the disaster they were helping to create. The highest paid lawyers in the world use transparent delay tactics in cases where the Huaorani demand restitution for a destroyed environment, living and way of life that had spanned previously unchanged for hundreds of years can turn into decades-long fights and often laughable outcomes that can turn on a bribe of an official paid less than a mid-level banker in our country by one of the most profitable corporations on the planet. They’re able to make billions of dollars in exploiting the Amazon, while paying a small amount for the relatively modest safety equipment required by a country that doesn’t know how important asking for more would be, and tossing some beads and trinkets like a school here or a few medical kits there for everything those people ever owned and a drastic challenge to their traditional values.
The money is brought into a tax shelter, say the Caman Islands, where it sits until a Rick Perry can lower the tax rate for repatriating capitol temporarily, allowing the kind of transfer of wealth which will completely evade certain corporate taxes that Ronald Reagan himself openly scoffed at as people not paying their fair share. This money will then partially be paid out as dividends to investors all over the world, perhaps waiting until taxes are lowered on capitol gains to hurry as much money out of the country while on a tax holiday. Part of the rest will go to lobbying firms, some of which provide have consistently shown a larger return on investment than actually complying with regulation, which will tie up agencies in notice and comment rulemaking to delay often desperately-needed regulations that would affect their business, and can sometimes be found at the end of a slippery slope relationship between regulator and industry, such as the thorough capture of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management regulation agency by the very industry that they were supposed to regulate funding agency employees blow and hooker parties. This lead to the head of the agency to step down after the Deepwater Horizen spill could partially be traced back to this cartoonishly absurd violation of ethics.
Another portion of said money will go to campaign financing of like-minded candidates who, while perhaps not openly promoting any company, will make sure that people understand that this industry provides jobs in a down economy even as they syphon as many of those jobs oversees to countries which are still willing to let their employees huff asbestos, such as in the glaring report filed by Aasiv Mandvi on a Canadian asbestos company doing business in India. The last portion will go to feed the Caligula-esque lives of CEOs through multi-million dollar bonuses which constitute their real salary, granting them the cocaine to fuel their graying bodies through a ladyboy romp through Southeast Asia (or whatever they do with that cash, as a recent law grad the high roller dough isn’t always immediately forthcoming). This is the essential modus operandi of the many of the big boys of the corporate world, the “there is no tie between smoking and cancer” guys who kept Joe Camel around just that much longer, delayed asbestos litigation by denying the industry heads had knowledge long after they clearly did in peer-reviewed industry hygein publications, and held on to those last studies that obscured connections between CO2 and global warming, taking a play out of the tobacco industry’s playbook to delay it all, screw it, you can at least sell the stock and bail long before the first major company settles a case and gives over the memos.
Rick Santorum talked about how his grandfather had to work hard to escape the corporate town which paid him in “coupons”, but if some far right elements of the Republican party had their way they’d turn back the clocks to the industrial revolution, where corporations ran rough shod over wages, working conditions, child labor law and human rights. It wasn’t until unions were organized to fight back, followed by Roosevelt trustbusting his way out of a period when the country had different, but still profound, problems with corporations that would take the splitting of some Irish, working class, protestor skulls, along with a couple of dead Pinkertons and the political life of an American titan for us to get over. Santorum is a good example of a political rush towards a hollow conservativism pressed by neoconservatives under Bush, rife with no-bid Halliburton contracts that proved the Darwinian business skill required of the era was not competence: their idea of conservative was not linked to market demands or small government.
The best way to do away with the worst abuses that manage to find loopholes in cleverly-written, often painfully-long legislation that effectively couches them is campaign finance reform; when this happens and the intent is followed through with and not circumvented by some Rove-esque Super Pac somehow (trust me, every loophole will be used, because who wants to fight with one hand behind their back?), we’ll see many of todays brand of politician, who, for the first time ever has a dozen intellectually-inconsistent soundbytes available to Joe Voter on their phone, become dinosaurs, like the silent stars who couldn’t transition to the talkies. This is because they’ve made a career on pleasing a very narrow segment of the population (though, at times extorting, bringing attention to how particular legislation has the potential to damage an industry, and how much their donation a reelection campaign could result in how they ultimately frame the question to the public and their colleagues) while appealing to voters with a bastardized message about tax cuts or subsidies that benefit their donors (or at time are regulations which are flatout written by lobbyists for industries), or one that is conveniently written around a “morals issue” campaign divorced from economics that we have often see in the early millenium, such as Terry Schiavo circa 2005. It’s sort of like that time that everyone’s favorite glamorous movie star was exposed to have a nasal, accented honk, sending a flood of new information and a comparative competitive disadvantage to a starlet who could walk and shake her shoulders nearly as well, but had the voice of an angel to complete the package and make up for a slight stumble in her ordinarily graceful poise. When these one trick political ponies are forced to please only voters, competing against someone who is intellectually consistent, charming and pleasing on almost every YouTube clip, they won’t have a chance. This is because video phones, YouTube and vast networks of communication play people’s highlight reels, and when what they say doesn’t match up and is compared against someone who is just as appealing in that “have a beer”/actually vote for you way, they’ll have a clearcut advantage in this quick dissemination, mass media leap that can destroy a candidate over a Rick Perry “oops” moment. It’s become almost a consumerism in politics, a thing that clearly follows people’s wants like a rabid tweet, such as when people wanted the Tea Party guys in office, but are instantly disappointed when they stubbornly refuse to compromise on enough to allow the government to work, which was exactly their platform; people are figuring out what they want out of their politicians in a more organized way now that they’re getting all this new information whenever they want, and we’re taking baby steps in being savvy shoppers here.
Politics is still lagging behind the times, with CNN video archives to document the times they clearly sold out a demographic which can remain bitter, like how the Republican filibuster of the Dream Act and subsequent promise from Mitt Romney to veto the same legislation if it came before him may well have helped to solidify the Latino vote for Obama (along with things like Herman Cain’s applause at building some sort of Mexican-zapping fence). This happens even when he has deported a record number of undocumented immigrants and has had a general lessez faire attitude about deferred action or administrative relief (both of which allow the administrative branch to at least temporarily keep an undocumented immigrant in the country), at times putting himself at odds with these same communities that went 2/3 in his favor in his last election. Any interruption of the system that excludes sincere, ideologically consistent people who don’t knock on either party doors or corporate doors for financing will pose a threat to many of the guys who write the laws. This is why it’s no wonder that even watered down lobby and campaign finance reform always coincides with scandals involving lobbyists on the Republican side (lets face it, they’re the deregulation guys, it’s natural that business and lobbyists would flock to them more even at times when they’re less eager to please, they’re just more ideologically related, and hence they want, and are ideologically consistent with taking, giant contributions from deep pockets, and will fight contributions harder as it’s both ideological and practical for them) that stick in the publics conscious long enough to last an election cycle or two. This was exemplified in the activities of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay hitting the news, setting off momentum strengthened by the Democrats retaking Congress, for reforms such as the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, the first significant piece of lobby legislation since the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (Gotta admit, that was a Republican[of a different era]-controlled Congress under Newt Gingrich and Strom Thurmond) and the Technical Amendments Act of 1997 which amended it. It’s not as though there aren’t good lobbyists, they just happen to be laughably outnumbered.
In the end, the thing that frightens me most is that, with all the incentives clearly driving businesses where liability can be lost in a shuffle of papers and third-world government bribes, agency capture and campaign donations, the single largest factor driving each individual actor (or at least the majority of the guys making those mouth watering bonuses) in a corporate action is fiduciary responsibility. For those of us without a legal education, a fiduciary obligation translates into every decision maker in the corporation being legally obligated to act in the corporation's best interest. In fact, if it is found that they are acting otherwise, such as Ford when he tried to have an unprofitable plant opened to give jobs to a community in poverty, a shareholder (who could live anywhere and give his orders from Beijing, Tokyo, etc.) can take you to court to have your decision reversed. This happened to Ford, and, long story short, he was found to have failed in his fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of the corporation, the shareholder sued and stopped the plant from being built, screwing over the community that it would have helped to ensure his own dividends and establish a precedent just in case any other corporate CEO grew a heart that wasn’t grown in a lab from babboon scrapings purely for public relations purposes.
Combine the above with the often-present lack of understanding of the complex factors which could be involved in any complicated, trans-national interaction (i.e. someone hiring a scientist to make a quick survey that barely meets minimal requirements and accidentally causing damage that not even the best scientific team could have predicted), as well as with a lack of contact and understanding of the stakeholders (i.e. anyone who doesn’t want brain tumors from exploratory drilling being decided on half a globe away), corporations are a predictably ravenous beast. What has been less predictable is the new amounts of leverage globalization has given them, which, I feel, is at least partially responsible for the inequality of wealth we’ve seen globally as the market for cheap labor in countries without human rights, labor or environmental laws has been booming and readily available for investment at a consistently declining bar of entry (which, again, can be seen in Aasif Mandvi’s scathing interview with a Canadian asbestos firm CEO whose business invests in deplorable working conditions in India that would doubtlessly be put under overnight in the American tort system where we refuse to huff asbestos, it’s really worth googling). I would also go so far as to implicate industry politics in being at least partially responsible for what amounted to a growing trend against unions recently, with Fox News anchors and House Reps alike openly denouncing unions, at times even calling them parasitic. The nature of this beast is to eat everything it can economically, regardless of which country the money is ultimately going to. As long as campaign contributions are good business, I don’t understand why anyone would think a mishmosh of uncoordinated corporate execs a la Barney Stinson or Gordon Gekko wouldn’t analyze sending lobbyists and campaign financing as they would any other investment, such as following through with health and safety regulations instead of calculating them against probable lawsuits and costs of complying like in a Palahniuk book and follow their bottom line of dividends and stock buybacks regardless of the public interest (after appropriate calculations for PR are made, of course).